Hidden Collections

Giorgio Di Noto has progressively explored photography as an unstable and ambiguous medium, always poised between document and invention.

This trajectory takes on a new form in the research conducted within the storage rooms, the conservation lab, and the photographic archive of Museo Nazionale Romano: spaces usually inaccessible to the public, where the past is not displayed but preserved, catalogued, and prepared for future viewing. Here, the artist engages with collections of sculptures, mosaics, frescoes, epigraphs, and everyday objects from the Republican era to the late Empire, with plates, negatives, prints, and slides related to archaeological excavations, restoration work, and the documentation of artifacts from the early 20th century to today. In this passage through images of archaeology, Di Noto’s photography becomes at once a stratigraphic and poetic tool, capable of questioning not only the artifacts but also the images that document them, along with the technical and cultural conditions of their representation.

By digging through these images of archaeologies, the traces of a complex process of manipulation emerge, one that, in isolating the artifacts, erases and obscures, transforming the act of making visible into a gesture of subtraction. Thus, the document becomes an artifact, masking becomes revelation, and technical intervention appears as a creative act.

Entrusting a visual artist with the interpretation of the hidden heritage of Museo Nazionale Romano means acknowledging that archaeology, like photography, is never neutral: it is a practice of selection, montage, and construction of meaning.

Di Noto’s work seems to remind us that every archive holds more than it declares; that photography is not only a document but also a language; that every image is never a finished object but a process, one that continues, over time, to reopen, transform, and generate further images.